Spatial Organization and the Built Environment Notes
Spatial Organization and the Built Environment
This article acknowledges the absence of a universally accepted approach to the topic due to its interdisciplinary nature.
It synthesizes ideas from previous publications.
The article is divided into two main sections:
The first introduces the approach and relevant concepts.
The second discusses substantive aspects of spatial organization and the built environment.
Conceptualization of the Built Environment
Built environments exhibit extraordinary variety across cultures and throughout history.
Built environments are a product of purposeful human activity and culture, not random or chaotic.
Environments perceived as chaotic are those that are not understood or are deemed inappropriate by an observer or group.
Understanding the underlying spatial and conceptual organization is crucial.
Western built environments often emphasize geometrical design.
Non-Western societies may structure their environments based on social, ritual, or symbolic principles.
These principles may or may not be expressed through geometric patterns.
Observers accustomed to geometric order may find non-Western environments incomprehensible.
Comprehension difficulties can arise when attempting to understand built environments ordered by different geometric principles.
Consideration of built environments must include people, activities, wants, needs, values, lifestyles, and other cultural aspects, not just the physical structures.
Three fundamental questions guide the study of human environments:
How do human characteristics influence the shaping of built environments?
What are the impacts of environmental aspects on individuals and groups under various conditions?
What mechanisms link people and environments?
The importance and relevance of the questions shift depending on the specific inquiry.
The focus is on human environments, although animals also build environments and organize space.
Conceptual organization precedes building, making built environments a subset of all human environments.
Various ways of conceptualizing human environments exist, with some being more relevant than others to spatial organization.
The concept of the 'setting' is introduced, combining 'behavior setting' and 'role setting'.
A setting comprises a milieu with an ongoing system of activities, linked by situation-specific rules that vary with culture.
Physical attributes of a setting cue people about appropriate behavior.
Settings are organized into systems connected in complex ways, considering spatial proximities, linkages, temporal sequences, centrality, and rules of inclusion/exclusion.
The extent and composition of any system of settings cannot be assumed and must be discovered.
This applies to dwellings and their larger settings (house-settlement system).
Dwellings are also systems of settings with activity systems.
Cross-cultural comparisons of dwellings are misleading if this system-of-settings approach is not considered.
Activities occur not only in buildings but also in outdoor areas, settlements, and the cultural landscape.
Settings are not the same as neighborhoods, streets, buildings, or rooms; any of these can contain multiple settings.
Spatial organization is partially independent of the physical structure (hardware).
A single-plan unit can accommodate different settings at different times.
Vacant land can become a market, a political rally, or a sports field, each comprising multiple settings.
Non-fixed and semi-fixed feature elements (people and objects) define setting boundaries within the larger space defined by fixed-feature elements.
Temporary settings are based on shared values or community of interests.
The units of comparison should be the systems of settings.
Semi-fixed feature elements (furnishings, signs, plants, etc.) define settings due to their mobility and responsiveness to social and cultural changes.
Settings include fixed, semi-fixed, and non-fixed feature elements.
The cultural landscape comprises the built environment and much of material culture.
Any environment expressing spatial organization involves relationships among people, between people and inanimate components, and among the inanimate components themselves.
The built environment involves the organization of space, time, meaning, and communication with non-human environments potentially conceptualized similarly.
These four elements can be studied separately, but their interactions and relationships must also be considered.
Spatial distribution of groups can be permanent or change rapidly, influencing the social geography of cities.
Perceptions of safety influence the use of urban areas at different times, leading to time-specific urban images.
Temporal organization needs to be studied alongside spatial organization.
Chronogeography links the organizations of space and time at regional and city scales.
Constraints on movement, influenced by meaning, affect communication.
The environment involves the organization of time, meaning, and communication, alongside space which must be considered alongside each other.
The question 'Who does what, where, when, including/excluding whom, and why?' helps to capture the joint effect.
Spatial and temporal organization can reinforce each other.
Temporal organization can substitute for spatial organization as a privacy mechanism.
Spatial organization influences communication, affecting patterns of interaction and information flow.
Meaning influences space, time, and communication, with urban cues shaping perceptions and behaviors.
Redundancy among these elements provides clear cues for behavior and facilitates it.
Privacy can be achieved through organizing time, regulating behavior, or separating in space.
Markers, such as changes in ground surface or roof beams, can indicate private space.
Erecting physical barriers like walls and doors reinforces expected norms of privacy.
The complex interactions among space, time, communication, and meaning form a complete ecological system.
Origins of the Built Environment
All living things organize space, though not always actively.
Animals, especially higher ones, organize space and this is a fundamental evolutionary fact.
Resource availability links to spatial organization that may be ecological, symbolic and social.
Human built environments have continuity with those of other animals.
A three-step evolutionary sequence exists:
Animals
Hominids
Humans
Latent (symbolic) resources increase in importance through that sequence.
Spatial organization of non-human animals responds to ecological resources.
Latent or symbolic factors increasingly influence hominids and humans.
Cultural landscapes vary due to latent aspects attracting people and reinforcing spatial organization.
Animals organize space, learn about environments, use regular routes, and occupy territories.
Animal habitats organize space, time, meaning, and communication.
Cognitive schemata or 'maps' of their lifespace guides animals.
Animals inhabit a spatial and social environment, build complex settings and mark boundaries.
Maintaining spatial organization requires communication in both human and non-human contexts.
There's a connection between space, communication, and meaning.
Apparent stone circles from two million years ago relate may indicate the establishment of ‘home-bases’.
Home bases imply a central site and food sharing.
Constructions at Olduvai, may have been windbreaks or bases for huts possibly relate to marking home-bases.
Early buildings, 300,000 years ago, arranged in camps imply complex social organization.
Socio-territorial arrangements were adaptive for early humans.
Humans mark locales, organize space, and establish rights, resulting in a mosaic of groups.
Permanent congregations become cities.
Spatial organization can be studied in terms of status, power, and cultural meaning.
Sacredness may have initially legitimized spatial organization based on ecological criteria.
Resource use involves organizing time, influencing communication.
Human space is anisotropic.
Systematic use of space creates spatial organization, based on rules and culture.
Space is culturally classified and socially regulated, resulting in shifting boundaries.
Permanent boundaries constitute the built environment.
The built environment is the visible physical expression of spatial organization.
Reasons and Purposes of Built Environments
Different approaches emphasize different reasons for organizing spaces and building environments.
There is no single reason for the built environment.
Latent (symbolic) aspects gain importance over instrumental functions in human evolution.
Variability is a key attribute of built environments.
Considering latent aspects can explain that variability.
Activities, functions, and objects vary from instrumental to symbolic aspects.
Cooking variations are influenced by status, ritual, and enculturation.
Binford divides artifacts into:
Technomic
Socio-technic
Ideo-technic
Ideo-technic functions vary the most, influencing artifacts.
Gibson points out how the use and value of trees change the cultural landscape.
Built environments become culture-specific by responding to latent aspects.
Cultural differences are conveyed through language, costume, food habits, etc., reinforced through verbal and non-verbal cues.
Clustering by homogeneity occurs in groups with lowered competence and under stress.
Variability exists due to the low criticality of built environments.
Constraints can be absolute, relative, or culturally imposed.
Spatial organization, territoriality, and privacy are linked to communication.
Control and boundary regulation are culturally variable.
Boundaries structure and articulate cultural landscapes while thought precedes physical expression.
Boundaries separate spaces and enclose domains.
Built Environment, Meaning, and Writing
Meaning plays a key role in the human organization of space and built environments.
Three levels of meaning exist:
High-level (cosmologies and world views)
Middle-level (identity, status, power)
Lower-level (instrumental cues)
Meanings vary cross-culturally and over time.
Writing and symbolic systems change the role of high-level meanings in the built environment.
Middle-level meanings become more important, as does the need for stronger lower-level meanings.
Built environments, spatial organization, and boundaries differ between developed and developing countries or groups across varying factors.
Nomads use movement for conflict resolution, reflecting social relationships through shifting of dwellings.
Residential patterns and house locations articulate land and people in semi-nomadic groups.
In settled societies, clustering by similarity is more common and the result is geography of neighborhoods.
Simple societies use single spaces for multiple activities while complex societies have specialized spaces.
Complex societies require redundant meaning cues for better boundary control.
Relationships Between the Built Environment and Culture
Culture defines built environments.
Culture definitions:
Way of life of a group.
System of symbols, meanings, and schemata.
Adaptive strategies.
Culture roles:
Distinguish groups and maintain identities.
Carry information.
Provide a framework for meaning.
Definitions of culture are not conflicting but complementary.
The concept of ‘culture’ is too general and abstract.
Dismantling the Concept of ‘Culture’
Culture needs to be made less general and abstract.
Dismantling can be visualized along two axes:
Culture as an ideational concept versus social expressions.
Culture as a general concept versus specific expressions (world views, values, etc.).
Spatial organization and built environments can be related to activity systems, lifestyles, values, status, roles, institutions, social groups, and networks.